Research Blog : trivia, websiteshttp://evpl.org/community/blogs/research/archive/tags/trivia/websites/default.aspxTags: trivia, websitesenCommunityServer 2008 SP1 (Build: 30619.63)What are the odds?http://evpl.org/community/blogs/research/archive/2009/11/04/what-are-the-odds.aspxWed, 04 Nov 2009 16:15:00 GMT9a7b961d-7882-4302-b701-732ca0e566f2:1923googler@evpl0http://evpl.org/community/blogs/research/rsscomments.aspx?PostID=1923http://evpl.org/community/blogs/research/archive/2009/11/04/what-are-the-odds.aspx#comments<p><img width="270" src="http://i459.photobucket.com/albums/qq316/evplreference/shark.jpg" alt="shark image" height="180" style="float:left;margin-left:10px;margin-right:10px;margin-top:5px;margin-bottom:5px;" />Ever wonder what the odds are that an adult planning a Halloween costume will be a cat? How about the odds&nbsp;of being killed by a shark? There&#39;s a new&nbsp;website, <a href="http://www.bookofodds.com/">The Book of Odds</a>,&nbsp;that does just that &mdash; it gives you odds.</p>
<p>You can do a simple keyword search, an odds search (finding anything that has a 1 in 100 chance of occurring by entering the number 100), or click on&nbsp;&quot;advanced search&quot; to look for additional content (articles and blog posts). Searching all content can be pretty interesting, particularly if you&#39;re looking to spice up a speech or a research paper, but there&#39;s not a huge amount of&nbsp;that kind of&nbsp;content. </p>
<p>The data comes from a lot of demographic studies, much of it&nbsp;market-based or governmental, and because of that, you tend to see age, gender, income, and location breakdowns&nbsp;that many people won&#39;t find that useful and tend to pad the result list..&nbsp;(They&#39;re not consistent breakdowns though, so no comparison of shark attack odds between Indiana and Florida.)&nbsp;</p>
<p>If you see something in the result list that you want to know more about or want to use in some way, click on the odds for an item and you&rsquo;ll get a visual representing those odds and a list of unrelated odds that are close or exactly the same as the one you&rsquo;re looking at. The detail page also has a button marked &quot;Sources &amp; Definitions.&quot; Click it and you&rsquo;ll get information on the source, rounding information, and even an appropriate way to cite the data presented. If you don&#39;t find odds for something you think should be there, click on &quot;suggest odds&quot; at the bottom of the page, and they may be able to research it and add it.</p>
<p>If you register and create an account (it&rsquo;s free) you can start your own book of odds, which allows you to track odds, send odds information to a friend, mark those that you like or those that apply to you, etc. Worth a visit! Oh, and before you leave the Book of Odds site be sure to visit the &quot;About Us&quot; page. I got a&nbsp;chuckle out of this : &quot;Book of Odds is not a search-engine, decision-engine, knowledge-engine, or any other kind of engine&hellip;so please don&rsquo;t compare us to Google(tm). We did consider the term &#39;probability engine&#39; for about 25 seconds, before coming to our senses.&quot;</p><div style="clear:both;"></div><img src="http://evpl.org/community/aggbug.aspx?PostID=1923" width="1" height="1">statisticsresearchuseful web siteswebsitesoddsdatatrivia